A smart watch can identify Parkinson’s disease up to seven years before the main symptoms appear.
People on the verge of developing Parkinson’s disease are slower for years before diagnosis, not only in their walking speed, but especially when it comes to light physical activity, such as cleaning, making the bed, or getting up to make a cup of tea.
This was discovered in a study of 103,712 people in the UK who were given a wrist-worn tracker, such as a smartwatch, and wore it for just a week.
The medical-grade tracker couldn’t discern how people moved during specific everyday tasks, such as doing housework, but it did record the average speed of their movements during each day.
People who later developed Parkinson’s disease were significantly slower in their movements, on average between 7 a.m. and midnight, compared to people of the same age and gender who also wore a fitness tracker and did not develop Parkinson’s disease.
The medical-grade tracker couldn’t discern how people moved during specific everyday tasks, such as doing housework, but it did record the average speed of their movements during each day. Pictured: smartwatch stock
They were especially slower when it came to light physical activity, which usually includes everyday activities.
The study results do not mean that a person can buy a smartwatch and thus predict their risk of getting Parkinson’s disease, because the movement data is not accurate enough for this.
But it can be used in a group of people to identify those who may be at greater risk.
This would allow that group of people to be included in scientific trials at a stage where the disease has not yet destroyed a large number of their brain cells.
That would show whether new drugs can save their brain cells and thus speed up the discovery of a drug for Parkinson’s disease.
There is currently no drug available to prevent or slow the disease, which affects people including host Jeremy Paxman and comedian Billy Connolly.
Dr Cynthia Sandor, who led the study from the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University, said: ‘Smartwatch data is easily accessible and cheap.
As of 2020, around 30 per cent of the UK population will be wearing a smartwatch.
‘Using data like this could potentially identify individuals in the very early stages of Parkinson’s disease within the general population.
“We showed here that a single week of recorded data can predict events up to seven years in the future.”
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, compared motion tracking data analyzed by artificial intelligence with four other methods of detecting Parkinson’s disease before it hits.
The exercise data outperformed looking at people’s genes and family history, the chemistry of their blood, high-risk lifestyle factors such as smoking and drinking, and other early medical symptoms such as loss of smell and urinary incontinence.
The study looked at people aged 40 to 69, from the UK Biobank study, who wore exercise trackers for a week and had their health records monitored for years.
This included 196 people who developed Parkinson’s disease more than two years after wearing a tracker to monitor their sedentary behavior, light, moderate and vigorous physical activity and sleep.
In addition to being slower during the day, those who later developed Parkinson’s were found to sleep longer at night and wake up more often than people who didn’t get the disease.
Conveniently, for the real world, where various age-related diseases can show similar early signs, this was not seen in people who later developed dementia or osteoarthritis.
That suggests smart watch data can successfully single out those who are only at risk for Parkinson’s.
Parkinson’s affects cells in the brain called dopaminergic neurons, which are located in an area of ??the brain known as the substantia nigra.
It causes motor symptoms such as tremors, stiffness and slowness of movement.
But the new study results suggest that years before they notice, people are subtly slowing down and seeking help from a GP.
That could make it possible to detect their risk of developing Parkinson’s before the normal time of diagnosis – when up to 70 percent of the cells in the substantia nigra have already been lost.